Reading things, senses, and meanings -- Intricate things on the page : the modernist short fiction of Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys -- Powerful things -- Ironical spirits and living mannequins : Jean Rhys, magic, and surrealism -- Dolls, boots, and madames : Djuna Barnes rewrites fetishism -- Lively things -- Djuna Barnes's piled-up and entangled assemblages -- Katherine Mansfield writing a nonhuman life -- Touching things -- Nice things : materiality and positive affect in Katherine Mansfield's and Jean Rhys's stories -- The affective journeys of Djuna Barnes's and Katherine Mansfield's stories -- Making sense of things -- Masses and vividnesses : the aesthetics and ethics of The Left bank -- At the indifferent bay : nonhuman perspectives and meaning in Katherine Mansfield's stories -- Djuna Barnes's detail and the materiality of the symbolic -- Conclusion: Reading affective materiality.

"Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction provides a fresh approach to reading material things in modern fiction, accounting for the interplay of the material and the cultural. This volume investigates how Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys use the short story form to evoke the material world as both living and lived, and how the spaces they create for challenging gendered social norms can also be non-anthropocentric spaces for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Using the unique knowledge created by literary works to spark new conversations between phenomenology, cognitive studies and new materialisms, complemented with a feminist perspective, this book explores how literature can touch the basic experience of being in, feeling and making sense of a material world that is itself alive and active. From a sensitive reading of how three women used the material world to make their readers see, feel, and question the norms shaping our experience, this volume draws a theory of reading affective materiality that illuminates modernism and the short story form but also reaches beyond them"-- Provided by publisher.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.